Recent Posts

"Some of us have our hard drives at home or on a VPS encrypted by Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) for security reasons, and these drives can quickly grow to tens or hundreds of GBs in size. So while we enjoy the security of our LUKS device, we may start to think about a possible remote backup solution. For secure off-site backup, we will need something that operates at the block level of the encrypted LUKS device, and not at the un-encrypted file system level. So in the end we find ourselves in a situation where we will need to transfer the entire LUKS device (let's say 200GB for example) each time we want to make a backup. Clearly not feasible. How can we deal with this problem?"

Nim is a young, statically typed programming language that has been getting more attention recently.

The language offers a syntax inspired by Python and Pascal, great performance and C interfacing, and powerful metaprogramming capabilities. The author of "Unix in Rust" just abandoned Rust in favor of Nim and some early-adopter companies are starting to use it as well.

"Nvidia surprised members of the overclocking community this week when it pulled OC support from drivers for its 900M series mobile graphics cards. Although Nvidia hasn’t gone out of its way the GTX 900M cards as being overclocking-friendly, many users (particularly those who bought laptops with higher-end cards like the 980m) were overclocking – until the latest driver update. Now, Nvidia is telling customers not to expect OC capabilities to return."

Let's be honest—if you're not hosting your source code on GitHub right now, your open source project pretty much doesn't exist. I have a lot of respect for solutions like Launchpad and BitBucket, but GitHub is still the place to go if you need a place to store and share your source code.

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GitHub uses Git, which is a distributed revision control system designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development back in 2005. Since then, it's become the most widely adopted version control system for software development there is.

We're excited to announce a brand new special event at Revision 2015 - the 120hz demo competition.

John Carmack, famous game programmer and CTO of Oculus wants to see what nifty demos or effects you can write for 120hz LightBoost displays and is sponsoring a special prize.

Since this is a special competition and no currently affordable projection systems exist to showcase those kinds of productions on the Revision bigscreen we'll have a special booth in the infodesk area where everybody can sit down and watch the demos which will run in a continuous loop.

Right now, even with the astonishing power of current multi-core processors and graphics chipsets, the people we encounter in visually beautiful games like Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Tomb Raider lack something in their faces, some spark of humanity. The phenomenon has a well-known name, the Uncanny Valley, coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. His hypothesis, first put forward in 1970, was that as human reproductions get closer to authenticity, the tiny inaccuracies become increasingly disturbing. Video game characters look so real, but not real enough, and we recoil from them.

Video game worlds are similarly abstracted. The city of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V; the bustling Paris of Assassin’s Creed: Unity ... all the surface details are there, but these are just virtual film sets. Most of the doors are locked, and if you point GTA’s most powerful rocket launcher at any building, the explosive impact will do no damage at all. The computational cost of simulating collapsing masonry is huge.

As usual, whilst working on one aspect of Avoyd I hit a hurdle and decided to take a break by tweaking some visuals - specifically looking at the normals for my surfaces. I added a step to generate face normals in the pixel shader using the derivatives of world space position, and immediately noticed precision issues when close to the surface. I'll demonstrate the issue and my quick fix which uses eye relative position instead of world space, before explaining what's happening in full.